Stress Bumps

I blog because I’m happy, and I’m happy because I blog.  But when I’m not happy….I am not blogging.  I once wrote a cranky blog post and every time I read it I think “Jeez, crab mouth!  No one wants to hear about your problems!”   So if I can’t find something clever or fun or educational to say, I won’t say anything at all.  But even when I don’t have anything good to say,  I’ll still give it the ol' college  try.  I know if I can somehow break through this paralyzing malaise and come up with something surprisingly witty, it will make me feel accomplished.  And feeling accomplished feels good, no matter how small the accomplishment.  I will sit in front of my laptop daring myself to try to write something humorous.  I’ll look on facebook, and youtube, and the local news for inspiration.  But it doesn’t help.  I sat in front of my macbook last night for 3 hours, and all I wrote was  “Leap and the net shall appear.”  Followed by this video:

That was all I could come up with.

Tired of trying, frustrated by my lack of creativity,  bothered by the fact that I am not acting like the jolly blogger you all know and love, I gave up and went to bed. Stressed.

Stress is change.  Stress is anticipating change.   It is the body and mind responding to changing conditions.   Everyone has stress in their lives.  But people handle it in very different ways.  Some people are severely affected by it and they think about the cause of stress at all times of the day and zone out all other parts of normal life and conversations until stress begins to manifest itself in physical ailments like hives, headaches, and sleepless nights (Julie) while others seem calm, cool, collected, and unaffected at all times (Trevor). Regardless of how we handle it, we all have it.

My mom tells me to put pressure on my temples, while repeating out loud: “I am ok, even though I am not ok.”  I give it a try....the pressure on the temple part anyways.  Something tells me if I utter
anything like that out loud I would either start laughing or crying uncontrollably.  Last night I went to bed with a cherry-sized lump on my temple… too much pressure…stress bumps.




Lately I have been thinking a lot about that ridiculously overwhelming,  unanswerable question:  What do I want to be when I grow up?  Also: What makes me happy?  And: How do you make a living doing what makes you happy?  I know for a fact that playing with babies, shopping at secondhand stores, blogging, and watching youtube videos of cats makes me really, really happy.   

So where do I go with that?